Xmas Excess / One woman's tale of getting back the real holiday spirit

by Lisa Margonelli, special to SF Gate

Published 4:00 am, Monday, December 23, 2002

With her fire-engine-red hair and her reindeer-antler headband, Shellie (not her real name) resembles a human Christmas ornament. At 54, she's vivacious and disarmingly honest in that you-know-you're-in-California way. She points to the antlers and says, "They're part of my recovery."

Recovery, for Shellie, is getting over her relationship with debt -- especially Christmas debt. Seven years ago, she was the queen of the Santa Clauses, never leaving her home without a gift for someone in hand, and she (and her husband) were perilously in arrears for hundreds of thousands of dollars. The reindeer antlers are for Shellie symbolic of going cold turkey on the credit cards and finding a way to celebrate a meaningful Christmas without the orgy of shopping and spending.

For many Americans, Christmas is a sleighful of debt. American Express estimates that the average American spends $1,656 at the holidays, and 63 percent of us use credit cards to pay. On average, we don't pay those expenses off until April. But for many, they never get paid off. In 1997, the total U.S. credit-card debt was $450 billion. By last year, according to the Consumer Federation of America, it was up to $600 billion. For Shellie, facing down her seemingly insurmountable debt was the key to finding not only a new way of celebrating Christmas but also a new self, a new sense of spirituality and a new financial outlook.

This Christmas, the "recovered" Shellie will make modest gifts for a few friends, and the highlight of the holiday will be a meal she prepares for her family and a 12-step group she belongs to. It's a far cry from the old, high-flying holidays seven years ago.

Then, Shellie, a graphic designer, and her husband, an entrepreneur who's worked in computers for 35 years, made a big deal of Christmas. "The holidays are tough because of all the emotions. Expectations." She sighs. "The way your family is extremely imperfect. One of the things we always wanted to do was to throw money at these problems and make them better."

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Shellie was known for the number and fabulousness of her gifts. "It combined the best and worst aspects of my personality," she laughs. "My gifts were thoughtful, intuitive and creative -- and I didn't care how much they cost." The most amazing was a 15-foot hand-woven belt, originally made to encircle a Mongolian yurt. It cost hundreds of dollars, but Shellie bought it anyway. "I'd spend compulsively on people," Shellie remembers, and then she reflects, "I was making up for feeling like I wasn't good enough on my own. I had to have a gift in my hands."

But she never totaled up her debt. And neither did her husband. In fact, the couple had gotten loans several times for his business. They had refinanced their house repeatedly and spent the cash they raised. They were locked in a cycle of spending, and had only a vague sense of what they owed. Their spending actually depended on never adding up the numbers on all the bills. "The dread was subconscious, but we were always running," she says. "We were always waiting for the shoe to drop." Shellie says spending money on credit was a drug. When she spent, she didn't feel so bad. So she spent. And the dread grew. And so on.

One day seven years ago, the shoe finally dropped. A client sued Shellie's husband for $175,000, and he lost the suit. The couple started to look at their finances: $70,000 in credit-card debt, a raft of outstanding business loans and a house depleted of equity. All that vagueness added up to an enormous amount of money. Even bankruptcy seemed impossible -- if they sold their house in the Valley's hot real estate market, they would have to leave the Bay Area, where Shellie's husband had spent a career building up contacts. Out of desperation, Shellie joined a 12-step group called Debtors Anonymous.

In DA, Shellie learned to make spending plans and to keep precise logs of how much money she spent. With other people in recovery from "debting," she discovered that being vague about debts was a common practice for overspenders. She and her husband made a commitment to incur no more unsecured debt. They tore up their credit cards, totaled up their deficits, held garage sales when they needed to repair their car and decided to "trust in a higher power."

It was a ka-boom moment. "I wrote down every cent I spent," she remembers. "It was a spiritual experience that kept me grounded. When I had been paying with credit cards, I was in the ozone. Really looking at how much I spent was mind altering."

To prove it, Shellie whips out a driver's license with an old picture of herself. Seven years ago, she was a hundred pounds overweight, and her gray hair was carelessly hacked off. The face on the card is closed and slightly sour, making her look at least a generation older than the sparkly reindeer lady in front of me.

Shellie discovered a curious thing about herself and her relationship to money. When members of the DA group asked her to estimate how much money she needed for herself, she quickly answered, "Nothing." Nothing for medical care, appearance, entertainment or exercise. As she said this, she had another life-altering realization: "I had a deflated idea of my needs, and I'd overcompensate with other things."

Compensation was dinners in gourmet restaurants, eating lots of sugar and carbohydrates and shopping -- always shopping. There were books and CDs and soaps and toys for friends' children. There were perfect lime squeezers. Lime squeezers! She laughs. "I thought if I got one other thing, it would be OK. I'd have all my ducks in a row. My future nailed down. But none of those things filled me up." And when that didn't work, she and her husband would take a vacation to Hawaii and lounge on the soft sheets, because "we deserved it."

As the couple paid down their debts, their lives began to change. Without the crutches of trips and fancy food, Shellie found she could take on harder, more demanding work as a designer, and her husband found that when he asked for the salary he needed, he got a promotion. Surprisingly, they discovered that by careful spending, they could keep their daughter in private school without incurring new debt, and they made a manageable schedule for paying old ones. Shellie began to take care of herself in ways that didn't involve money. They found they didn't "need" the vacations or the gourmet meals anymore.

She also started to think about how she'd gotten to this point. Shellie's father was blue collar, but her mother dreamed of more for her five kids. Shellie remembers her mom moving the family to an upwardly mobile town, joining a women's club and buying clothes from the organization's second-hand store. "We always had enough to eat," says Shellie, as though she is still puzzled, "but there was this unspoken feeling that what we had wasn't good enough."

Other ideas she had grown up with were irrational. For one thing, all that dread she'd been living with had its basis in a long-lived fear. Shellie discovered that all her life, she'd been plotting in the back of her mind about how to survive if she had "nothing." "You know the Grapes of Wrath?" she says. "If it came to that, I wasn't going to live on the road like them. I had a backup plan." Ever since childhood, Shellie imagined how she would survive in a tent if worse came to worse, and she even went so far as to study edible plants. Admitting her illogical fears made her feel lighter.

But even with her new sense of well being, the first Christmas after the crisis was the test. How would the ultimate Santa Claus survive a presentless Christmas? Shellie approached her teenage daughter and asked how she felt about the family writing letters to each other as gifts. To her surprise, her daughter was OK with it. So, for the next few weeks, the family labored over their missives. Their daughter typed hers on a typewriter and made collaged envelopes. Shellie wrote hers with calligraphy. Her husband did his on the computer with scanned pictures.

On Christmas morning, they opened their letters. "It was very moving," says Shellie. And then she stops talking, because there really aren't any glued-together 12-step words, or any fa-la-la-la Christmas words or even any phrases like, "There are some things money can't buy. For everything else, there's MasterCard" to describe what it was like to offer her daughter a letter. Shellie is silent, then she adds, "My daughter said she didn't need anything. You think kids want more, but they don't. They want what's real."

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